Projecting Carson Wentz's Trades impact on the Philadelphia Eagles 2022 Draft Picks

By Kai Canoll

Synopsis:

The trade between the Eagles and the Colts of Carson Wentz for a 2020 3rd round pick and a conditional 2021 2nd round pick was much discussed. It is certainly one of the weirder trades out there in terms of it's conditions. In short, in order for the Eagles to recieve a 1st round pick, Wentz has to either play:

1) 75% of offensive snaps for the Colts.
2) 70% of offensive snaps and the Colts have to make the playoffs. 

If these conditions are not met, the Eagles will instead recieve a 2nd round pick from the Colts.

Now, as you can imagine, this leaves a huge distribution of possible draft picks the Eagles could recieve from the 1st and 2nd round.

Each final compensatory pick has it's own probability of occurence, however, and I am here to try an project it!

Sources:

Look here for how I got my info:

Sportsipy has good stats info for free on players: https://sportsreference.readthedocs.io/en/stable/examples.html

538 has good projections on the season: https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/#nfl-elo

Fantasy Pros has info on Carsons Rolling Offensive Snap % Count by Week https://www.fantasypros.com/nfl/reports/snap-counts/qb.php?year=2021&show=perc&print=true

Change Variables of Interest Here

Function Definition

Get Game Win Probs from FiveThirtyEight

Find Postseason Projection for each team

All Teams Playoff Postseason Odds Dataframe

Specifically Colts Chances at Each Round of Playoffs

Find Current Carson Wentz Snap Percentage

List of Team Abbreviations

Playoff adjusted for picks 19-32

Adjusting for playoff odds is a little hard with what 538 gave me. Instead, I'm using "http://www.playoffstatus.com/nfl/nflpostseasonprob.html" which has the chances of Colts winning each theoretical playoff game

Actual Simulation Loop (Takes up to 15 minutes, sorry)

Compile DataFrame of Simulations

Take a look at Simulation Dataframe, each row is an outcome

Average Snap Percentage by Carson

Average Draft Pick Colts

Highest Occuring Draft Pick

Histogram of All Draft Picks

CDF of Draft Picks

Chance of Draft Pick in the First Round

Chance of Top 20 Pick

Chance of Top 10 Pick

Chance of Top 5 Pick

Lowest Probable Pick

Highest Probable Pick

Average Pick By First Quarter Result

Average Pick by Halfway Point Result

Average Pick by Third Quarter Result

Desired Wins By Third Quarter for Eagles

This number of wins by week 13 would represent the lowest average comp. pick

Draft Pick by Time Out of Playoff Picture

Total Wins For Indy and Average Draft Pick

Making Playoffs vs. NOT

Probability Distribution of Final Pick based off of each Quarter (every 4 games) Result

First Quarter of Season Done

Season Halfway Done

Third Quarter Done

Save CSV of simulation

Analysis

There is no guarantee that the rules of this simulation accurately map out the thought process of the Colts front office. The organization is famously incompetent and prone to misusing their players. Through the first few weeks of this 2021 season, Carson has played admirably under intense pressure from both the media and opposing defensive lines. As long as he is availible and healthy, he will be fighting for his starting job in the league, and the Colts may not be able to bench him so easily even in a losing season if his performance is this good.

Regardless, even after an 1-3 start, this distribution should show Eagles fans that a pick in the top 5 is essentially a pipe dream.